I`m building a RTS game.

But then the question should be: What can self aware NPCs add to a RTS game?

What would be some examples? Some interesting situations?
The point is - if we can construct such examples, we can also think about algorithms and data structures to enable this, because we have a clear goal and problem to solve.
We'll come up with new ways to fake AI. In the best case. I mean, that's all we can seriously expect. Self awareness requires consciousness, which is out of reach.

they are two different things. The terminator is very focused on people. A rts artificial mind treats people at a smaller scale, a rts unit can`t do a lot of things. self awarenes is looking who`s watching you.

self awarenes is something I like as a person but it`s something that needs debated when we talk about AI

a rts unit can`t do a lot of things

I see two main problems about games:

1. Players can't to much.
2. NPCs can do even less.

It should be possible to improve that, but i always focused just on point one.
AI is about the second, and RTS is a nice genre so the player can actually see what's going on: There is some AI about strategy of a large scale, but units themselves are dump.

What if we changed this? So units act more individually, reacting to local events, or even create such events?
What could those events be, and what game would we get?
Maybe we would need to zoom in a bit closer, to focus on local events where interesting or important.
Then, after the situation got handled, we zoom out again and care about large scale tactics. Could be quite interesting.